For more than 200
years, this book concealed the arcane rituals of an ancient order.

But cracking the code only
deepened the mystery.
Image courtesy: Uppsala University

The master wears an amulet
with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the
candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements.

The year
is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.

The master places a piece of paper in front of
the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses.

“Read,” the
master commands.

The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The
page is blank.

The candidate is told not to panic; there is
hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a
cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair
of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their
candles.

The master starts plucking hairs from the
candidate’s eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But
these are “symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning,” the
master assures the candidate.

The candidate places his hand on the master’s
amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with
another. This page is filled with handwritten text.

Congratulations,
brother, the members say. Now you can see.

For more than 260 years, the contents of that
page - and the details of this ritual - remained a secret.

They were hidden
in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the
18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine
organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of
adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg.

Dismissed
today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they
once served an important purpose:

Their lodges were safe houses where
freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights
of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian
eyes of church and state.

But largely because they were so secretive, little
is known about most of these organizations.

Membership in all but the
biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have
remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.

It was actually an accident that brought to
light the symbolic “sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as
a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of
experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual
history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher.

Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how
esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread
underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way to know for
sure is to break the codes.

In this case, as it happens, the cracking began
in a restaurant in Germany.

For
years,Christiane Schaefer and Wolfgang Hock
would meet regularly at an Italian bistro in Berlin. He would order pizza,
and she would get the penne all’arrabbiata. The two philologists - experts
in ancient writings - would talk for hours about dead languages and obscure
manuscripts.

It was the fall of 1998, and
Schaefer
was about to leave Berlin to take a job in the linguistics department at
Uppsala University, north of Stockholm. Hock announced that he had a
going-away present for Schaefer.

She was a little surprised - a parting gift
seemed an oddly personal gesture for such a reserved colleague. Still more
surprising was the present itself: a large brown paper envelope marked with
the words top secret and a
series of strange symbols.

Schaefer opened it. Inside was a note that read,

“Something for those long Swedish winter nights.”

It was paper-clipped to
100 or so photocopied pages filled with a handwritten script that made no
sense to her whatsoever:

Arrows, shapes, and runes. Mathematical symbols
and Roman letters, alternately accented and unadorned. Clearly it was some
kind of cipher.

Schaefer pelted Hock with questions about the manuscript’s
contents. Hock deflected her with laughter, mentioning only that the
original text might be Albanian. Other than that, Hock said, she’d have to
find her own answers.

A few days later, on the train to Uppsala,
Schaefer turned to her present again. The cipher’s complexity was
overwhelming: symbols for Saturn and Venus, Greek letters like pi and gamma,
oversize ovals and pentagrams.

Only two phrases were left unencoded:

“Philipp 1866,” written at the start of the manuscript, and “Copiales 3″ at
the end.

Philipp was traditionally how Germans spelled the name.

Copiales
looked like a variation of the Latin word for “to copy.” Schaefer had no
idea what to make of these clues.

She tried a few times to catalog the symbols, in
hopes of figuring out how often each one appeared. This kind of frequency
analysis is one of the most basic techniques for deciphering a coded
alphabet. But after 40 or 50 symbols, she’d lose track. After a few months,
Schaefer put the cipher on a shelf.

Thirteen years later, in January 2011,
Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics.
Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. She preferred musty books to
new technologies and didn’t even have an Internet connection at home. But
this lecture was different.

The featured speaker was Kevin Knight, a University of
Southern California specialist in machine translation - the use of
algorithms to automatically translate one language into another.

With his stylish rectangular glasses, mop of
prematurely white hair, and wiry surfer’s build, he didn’t look like a
typical quant. Knight spoke in a near whisper yet with intensity and
passion. His projects were endearingly quirky too. He built an algorithm
that would translate Dante’s Inferno based on the user’s choice of
meter and rhyme scheme.

Soon he hoped to cook up software that could
understand the meaning of poems and even generate verses of its own.

Knight was part of an extremely small group of
machine-translation researchers who treated foreign languages like ciphers -
as if Russian, for example, were just a series of cryptological symbols
representing English words.

In code-breaking, he explained, the central job
is to figure out the set of rules for turning the cipher’s text into plain
words:

which letters should be swapped, when to turn a phrase on its head,
when to ignore a word altogether.

Establishing that type of rule set, or
“key,” is the main goal of machine translators too.

Except that the key for
translating Russian into English is far more complex. Words have multiple
meanings, depending on context. Grammar varies widely from language to
language. And there are billions of possible word combinations.

But there are ways to make all of this more
manageable. We know the rules and statistics of English: which words go
together, which sounds the language employs, and which pairs of letters
appear most often. (Q is usually followed by a u, for
example, and “quiet” is rarely followed by “bulldozer.”) There are only so
many translation schemes that will work with these grammatical parameters.
That narrows the number of possible keys from billions to merely millions.

The next step is to take a whole lot of educated
guesses about what the key might be.

Knight uses what’s called an
expectation-maximization algorithm to do that. Instead of relying on a
predefined dictionary, it runs through every possible English translation of
those Russian words, no matter how ridiculous; it’ll interpret
as “yes,” “horse,” “to break dance,” and “quiet!”

Then, for each one of
those possible interpretations, the algorithm invents a key for transforming
an entire document into English - what would the text look like if
meant “break dancing”?

The algorithm’s first few thousand attempts are
always way, way off. But with every pass, it figures out a few words. And
those isolated answers inch the algorithm closer and closer to the correct
key.

Eventually the computer finds the most statistically likely set of
translation rules, the one that properly interprets
as “yes” and
as “quiet.”

The algorithm can also help break codes, Knight
told the Uppsala conference - generally, the longer the cipher, the better
they perform. So he casually told the audience, “If you’ve got a long coded
text to share, let me know.”

Funny, Schaefer said to Knight at a reception
afterward.

I have just the thing.

A blindfold that allows the
wearer to see,

worn by members of the society who wrote the “Copiale”
cipher.
Photo: Niedersä Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel

A copy of the cipher
arrived at Knight’s office a few weeks later.

Despite his comments at the
conference, Knight was hesitant to start the project; alleged ciphers often
turned out to be hoaxes. But Schaefer’s note stapled to the coded pages was
hard to resist. “Here comes the ‘top-secret’ manuscript!!” she wrote. “It
seems more suitable for long dark Swedish winter nights than for sunny
California days - but then you’ve got your hardworking and patient
machines!”

Unfortunately for Knight, there was a lot of
human grunt work to do first. For the next two weeks, he went through the
cipher, developing a scheme to transcribe the coded script into
easy-to-type, machine-readable text.

He found 88 symbols and gave them each
a unique code:

became “lip”

became “o..”

became “zs”

By early March he had entered the first 16 pages of the cipher
into his computer.

Next Knight turned to his
expectation-maximization algorithm. He asked the program what the
manuscript’s symbols had in common. It generated clusters of letters that
behaved alike - appearing in similar contexts. For example, letters with
circumflexes ()
were usually preceded by
or
.

There were at least 10 identifiable character clusters that repeated
throughout the document. The only way groups of letters would look and act
largely the same was if this was a genuine cipher - one he could break.

“This is not a hoax; this is not random. I can solve this one,” he told
himself.

A particular cluster caught his eye: the
cipher’s unaccented Roman letters used by English, Spanish, and other
European languages.

Knight did a separate frequency analysis to see which of
those letters appeared most often. The results were typical for a Western
language. It suggested that this document might be the most basic of
ciphers, in which one letter is swapped for another - a kid’s decoder ring,
basically. Maybe, Knight thought, the real code was in the Roman alphabet,
and all the funny astronomical signs and accented letters were there just to
throw the reader off the scent.

Of course, a substitution cipher was only simple
if you knew what language it was in. The German Philipp, the Latin
copiales, and Hock’s allusion to Albanian all hinted at different
tongues.

Knight asked his algorithm to guess the
manuscript’s original language. Five times, it compared the entire
cryptotext to 80 languages. The results were slow in coming - the algorithm
is so computationally intense that each language comparison took five hours.
Finally the computer gave the slightest preference for German.

Given the
spelling of Philipp, that seemed as good an assumption as any. Knight didn’t
speak a word of German, but he didn’t need to. As long as he could learn
some basic rules about the language - which letters appeared in what
frequency - the machine would do the rest.

While his family
got ready for spring vacation - a “history tour” of the East Coast - Knight
looked for patterns in the cipher. He saw that one common cipher letter,
,
was often followed by a second symbol,
.
They appeared together 99 times; a
frequently came after:
.

Knight reviewed common German letter
combinations. He noticed that C is almost always followed by H, and CH is
often followed by T. This sequence is used all the time in German words like
licht (“light”) and macht (“power”).
,
Knight guessed, might be cht. It was his first major break.

During his vacation, as his daughters played on
their iPads at night in the hotel room, Knight scribbled in his orange
notebook, tinkering with possible solutions to the cipher. So far what he
had was a simple substitution code. But that left scores of cipher symbols
with no German equivalent.

So one evening Knight shifted his approach. He
tried assuming that the manuscript used a more complex code - one that used
multiple symbols to stand for a single German letter.

Knight put his theory to the test. He assumed,
for example, that
,
,
and
all stood for I. It worked. He found others, and soon he started assembling
small words, like
or der (“the” in German), which Knight recognized from World War II
movies.

Then he got his first big word:
,
or candidat, followed by
,
or antwortet (“the candidate answers”). The cipher’s wall of
secrecy was crumbling.

But some of the cipher’s symbols - especially
iconic ones like
,
,
and
- remained baffling. Worse, he couldn’t get German translations for any of
the cipher’s standard Roman letters.

On March 26, Knight reviewed his notebook. The
words of his first phrase - Der candidat antwortet - were separated
by an
and an
.
That made no sense if the coded
and
stood for German letters. That’s when Knight realized how wrong his initial
assumption had been. The unaccented Roman letters didn’t spell out the code.

They were the spaces that separated the words of
the real message, which was actually written in the glyphs and accented
text.

A trio of handwritten notes,

each from an aristocrat asking to be admitted into the society.
Photo: Niedersä Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel

On March 31, Knight sent an email to Schaefer and her boss, Beáta Megyesi,
head of Uppsala’s department of linguistics and philology, who was also
interested in the manuscript.

Schaefer stared at the screen. She had spent a
dozen years with the cipher. Knight had broken the whole thing open in just
a few weeks.

The message in these two lines was almost as
remarkable. Schaefer made a few tweaks and sent back a tentative
translation: “This stroke is the sign/the symbol and the beginning of the
confidentiality/familiarity that the brother, from now on companion, can
expect of us …”

It was an initiation ritual, Schaefer said.
Geselle literally means a “companion.”

But she knew the term was also
used in fraternal orders - clandestine societies like the Freemasons. In
this context, a geselle was a rank in a secret society.

Schaefer’s boss, Megyesi - a 41-year-old
Hungarian émigré - was especially taken by the cipher’s contents. “I would
not mind being chased by a secret org,” she emailed Knight. At night, after
she was done managing her department of 450 courses and 25 professors and
after she put her twins to bed, Megyesi sat at the computer, turning the
symbols into text. She and Knight started emailing multiple times a day
about the cipher - and signing their emails in Copiale cipher text.

But they still hadn’t cracked the code’s big
symbols - especially
,
which they transcribed as “lip.” Megyesi and Schaefer were pretty sure it
stood for a word, not a letter. But they weren’t sure what word it meant.

Then one night in the middle of April, while
Megyesi was working late in her office, she stared absentmindedly at the
neatly arranged folders on her desk. She looked at a page containing the lip
symbol.

Schaefer walked into her office just as she was thinking about this.

Megyesi looked up.

“This symbol,” Megyesi said to Schaefer,
“it’s not a lip. It’s an eye.”

The Oculists’ seal, featuring
a cataract needle, a pair of pince-nez, and two cats watching over mice.
Photo: Niedersä Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel

As it turned out,
Schaefer had made a discovery of her own.

A phrase in the Copiale text, a
reference to the “light hand” required to be a master of the society, had
seemed familiar to her.

So she dug up an
academic article she had read some time before about a secret order in
Germany that called itself the Great Enlightened Society of Oculists. The
“light hand” was mentioned in their bylaws.

It was a massive breakthrough. Active in the
mid-18th century, the Oculists fixated on both the anatomy and symbolism of
the eye. They focused on sight as a metaphor for knowledge.

And they
performed surgery on the eye.

“We exceed all other [healers] by being able
to pierce all cataracts, whether they’re fully developed or not,” the group
boasted in its public - and uncoded - bylaws.

Centered in the
town of Wolfenbüttel, Germany,
the Oculists, it was believed, played the role of gatekeepers to the
burgeoning field of ophthalmology.

They kept out the “charlatans” who could
cause someone to,

“lose their eyesight forever.”

On their crest, the Oculists featured a cataract
needle and three cats (which, of course, can see in near darkness).

In their
bylaws, the Oculists’ emphasis on the master’s “light hand” seemed to be a
reference to members’ surgical skill. And they appeared to have a rather
progressive attitude; women could be Oculists, just like men.

Schaefer contacted the state archives in
Wolfenbüttel, which housed a collection of Oculist materials. The archives
had a coded text just like the Copiale - and some cool amulets too.

Megyesi plunged even deeper into the cipher. But
the text confused her. The weird rituals it described didn’t exactly seem
like medical school classes. Although the Copiale mentioned the master’s
“light hand,” Megyesi couldn’t find anything in the coded text about eye
surgery or cataracts.

Instead the Copiale noted that the master had to,

“show his skill in reading and writing of our cipher.”

These Oculists might
have been presenting themselves as ophthalmologists in public. But inside
the order’s chambers, the light hand must have meant something else.

Could
it have been about keeping secrets through cryptology?

Even with its code broken, the Copiale’s swirl
of ritual and double-talk was getting harder and harder to follow -
especially for someone whose experience with secret orders was drawn mainly
from cheesy movies. Megyesi knew she needed help figuring out what these
societies were all about.

So she asked around for someone who could tell her
what really happened in those candlelit initiation rooms.

The cover of the “Copiale”
cipher.
Image: courtesy of Uppsala University

“Like the kid who sees candies, I could not resist,” he
says, tugging gently at his ascot. “Plus, my boss wasn’t there.”

They agreed to meet in September in the
castlelike university library in Lund, Önnerfors’ cobblestoned hometown in
southern Sweden.

Megyesi and Schaefer came down from Uppsala with the
Copiale manuscript.
Knight flew in from California.

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans belonged to
secret societies in the 18th century, Önnerfors explained to Megyesi.
In
Sweden alone, there were more than a hundred orders. Though they were
clandestine, they were often remarkably inclusive. Many welcomed noblemen
and merchants alike - a rare egalitarian practice in an era of strict social
hierarchies.

That made the orders dangerous to the state.

They also
frequently didn’t care about their adherents’ Christian denomination, making
these orders - especially the biggest of them, Freemasonry - an implicit
threat to the authority of the Catholic Church.

In 1738 Pope Clement XII
forbade all Catholics from joining a Masonic lodge.

Others implied that the
male-only groups might be hotbeds of sodomy. Not long after, rumors started
that members of these orders actually worshipped the devil.

These societies were the incubators of
democracy, modern science, and ecumenical religion. They elected their own
leaders and drew up constitutions to govern their operations. It wasn’t an
accident that Voltaire, George Washington, and Ben Franklin were all active
members.

And just like today’s networked radicals, much of their power was
wrapped up in their ability to stay anonymous and keep their communications
secret.

After reading the Oculists’ cipher, Önnerfors
suggested that it described one of the more extreme groups.

Forget the
implicit threats to the state or church. In part of the Copiale, there’s
explicit talk about slaying the tyrannical,

“three-headed monster” who
“deprive[s] man of his natural freedom.”

There’s even a call for a “general
revolt.”

Remember, Önnerfors told the code-breakers, this book was written
in the 1740s - 30 years before the Declaration of Independence.

“To someone
at the time,” he added, “this would be like reading a manifesto from a
terrorist organization.”

To Önnerfors, decoding the Copiale was a
significant achievement.

Traditionally, historians have just ignored
documents like this, because they don’t have the tools to make sense of
them. That’s why the Oculists passed as early surgeons for so long. But
there are scores of these enciphered documents - many in Lund alone.

Some concern new rites of a fraternal order;
others could detail political movements. There’s no way to tell for sure,
because they’re cryptologically sealed. There’s a whole secret history of
the West waiting to be told.

There are so many more codes.

Decoding the Copiale

Cracking the so-called
Copiale cipher
was a three-step process. First the characters had to be rendered as
machine-readable text:
became “eh,” and
became “lip.”

Next, software analyzed the behavior of
the cipher letters and guessed that the Copiale’s original language
was German. The code-breaking team then was able to translate the
text into German and finally into English, revealing a secret manual
of an esoteric society.

German
results

English
translation

The history of the origin of the Oculist
society. Curiosity is the inheritance of mankind. Frequently we want
to know something only because it needs to be kept secret.

These unaccented Roman letters appeared
with the frequency you’d expect in a European language. But they
don’t represent letters - they mark the spaces between words.

Algorithmic analysis showed that letters
that looked alike also acted alike. These all actually stand for the
letter E. It’s a way to confuse codebreakers.

The Copiale’s more unusual symbols
denote words, not letters - in this case, “Oculist” and “society.”

On October 25, 2011,The New York Times
published a story about the Copiale, focusing on Knight’s code-cracking
techniques.

A flood of media attention followed - along with hundreds of
emails from people who claimed to have ancient ciphers of their own. In
December, when I visited Knight, he had just received a picture from Yemen.
Some Bedouins had found a stone with an unknown, squarish script.

Perhaps
Knight could tell them what it said?

This was unfamiliar turf. Knight and the other
members of the Copiale team weren’t used to such attention. And not all of
it was positive: There were also miffed Masons telling him he didn’t
understand the full picture, and warnings from the fringe set telling them
to stop spilling dusty secrets or claiming that Lucifer was really the
Freemason god.

Back in Lund, Önnerfors grew surprised too as he
continued to plumb the Copiale. In the midst of the descriptions about
Oculist rituals, the document took a narrative turn.

It described a meeting
of,

“a few good friends” who talked about people’s desire to “know something
only because it needs to be kept secret.”

The friends decided to use this
curiosity to play a little prank.

They set up a fraternity and,

“would agree
immediately as they would like to pretend that a great secret would be
behind their unification.”

They called this farce, this hoax, this grand
psychological experiment Freemasonry.

That certainly wasn’t true, but at the very
least the Oculists seemed to be watching Freemasonry’s every move. Starting
on page 27 and continuing for the remaining 78 pages, the cipher detailed
the rituals performed by the highest degrees of the Masonic order - rites
unknown to ordinary Masons at the time.

Nothing was omitted from the Copiale’s descriptions of these top-level rituals. Not the skulls. Not the
coffins. Not removal of undergarments nor the nooses nor the veneration of
Hiram Abiff, builder of the Great Temple of Jerusalem, whose decomposed body
became the alchemical emblem for turning something rotten into something
miraculous and golden.

Decades later, most of these practices became
widely known as the Freemasons’ secrets seeped out. But in the 1740s they
were still well concealed - except to the Oculists. The Oculists were a
secret society that had burrowed deep into another secret society.

Önnerfors
noted that the cats on the Oculists’ insignia were watching over mice.

It
could be another Oculist joke - or a sign that they were spies.

A note from October 30, 1775 reads, “This
box concerns the Oculist Order,

and is not to be opened until special
order of the Duke.”

Photo: Niedersä Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv
Wolfenbüttel

Before their cipher was broken, the Oculists were practically unknown.

The main thing historians in Wolfenbüttel knew about the group was that it
was led by a count named Friedrich August von Veltheim, who died in April
1775. Like many aristocrats of his day, he belonged to multiple secret
societies, including an Order of the Golden Poodles, which likely sounded as
goofy back then as it does today.

But in his will, his Oculist heirlooms
merited special instructions.

He had locked all of the Oculists’ objects in
a leather trunk and ordered his son to make sure the seals remained unbroken
until the local duke (or one of the duke’s descendants) said otherwise. If
the count’s goal was to make sure that whatever was inside that trunk faded
into obscurity, he succeeded.

The trunk wasn’t opened until 1918. Its
contents - now at the state archives in Wolfenbüttel - have rarely been
examined since.

After months of talking about the Oculists with
Knight, Schaefer, Megyesi, and Önnerfors, I decided this past winter to see
Count von Veltheim’s trove for myself.

Unable to make the trip personally, Önnerfors
arranged for his mentor - a professor named Jan Snoek - to meet me at the
archives. Snoek is a high-degree Mason who has designed his own rituals for
the order.

We met at the archives in Wolfenbüttel and found a series of
rectangular boxes waiting for us.

Snoek and I took them into a private reading
room with circular windows that overlooked a browning forest. Inside the
first box was the silver-dollar-sized seal of the Oculists; its watchful
cats and pince-nez perfectly preserved thanks to almost two and a half
centuries of near isolation. Another box revealed a bone-handled cataract
needle and the luminescent green aprons that members wore.

Inside a third
box were five oval amulets bearing raised blue eyes so anatomically correct
I half expected them to wink.

There was also a tiny cylinder, covered in jade
and gold - the colors of the Copiale itself. I screwed it open to find a
tortoise-shell cup holding an eye made of ivory and horn. The model came
apart like a Russian doll: pupil inside lens, iris on top of pupil, cornea
resting on iris.

Each layer was more exquisite than the next.

In this Oculist text, the coded symbols seem
to stand for numbers, not letters.
Photo: Niedersä Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel

The artifacts laid out in the reading room also
undercut the idea that the Oculists were sleeper agents on a mission to
expose Freemasonry.

Why would spies need all these extra rituals? Or be so
interested in anatomy?

Put yourself in a Mason’s shoes, Snoek
explained. The Catholic Church has outlawed your order - and every other
secret society. You don’t want to give up your Freemasonry, but you don’t
want to be accused of sodomy.

Even in a largely Protestant country like
Germany, that was a withering accusation at the time.

So “you hide it in a
veil,” Snoek said.

You start a new set of rituals, to layer on top of the
old - and make it impregnable to Vatican attacks.

Perhaps the Oculists weren’t spying on
Freemasonry so much as keeping it alive.

“As a Mason you are not allowed to write down -
let alone publish - your rituals,” Snoek said.

So how do you spread your
ideas?

You publish esoteric rites as if they are exposures - public outings
of Masonry. Except you publish in code, so only an elite cadre of fellow
Masons can read the dangerous things you have to say. And when your mission
is over, you stuff all the evidence into a box that doesn’t get opened for
nearly 150 years.

The Oculists guarded and transmitted the Masons’ deepest
secrets, Snoek believes, using a mixture of ritual, misdirection, and
cryptography.

Eventually we turned to the last items in the
Oculist trove: nine copies of a four-page document written in a mixture of
old German, Latin, and the Copiale’s coded script.

The message was more or
less identical in every set.

“Die Algebra,” it said at the top of
page one, a primer on the “old way of calculating.”

Rows of cipher letters
lay beneath.

The document seemed to add them up as if they were numbers. The
third page mentioned the Jewish Cabala - the mystical system in which
meaning is derived from the numerical value of letters.

It would appear that the Copiale symbols don’t
represent just words and letters, they stand for numbers too.

But if they
do, Knight, Megyesi, and Schaefer haven’t been able to tease out the
meaning. The Oculist master apparently understood these coded documents in a
way that today’s interpreters do not. Despite years’ worth of attacks on
their cipher, the Oculists’ secrets have not been pried loose, at least not
fully.